Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro by Camillia Cowling (review)

This book signals an important shift underway in Atlantic abolition studies where historians are increasingly analyzing how the ending of slavery also sparked other profound social, political, and cultural developments. For Camillia Cowling, abolition reflects “a journey, and not simply an outcome” (6). Earlier historiographical debates over “who caused emancipation,” or even, “how do we assess the importance of slave agency,” form part of, but do not consume Conceiving Freedom. Instead, this book represents the most detailed and nuanced work yet on how women’s struggles for their own and their children’s freedom recast broader understandings about manhood and womanhood in general, and about the relationship between womanhood and motherhood in particular. Cowling asserts that “any number of their stories contained in this book could be seen as just as much struggles for custody as for freedom” (219). In perceptibly connecting the histories of Atlantic slavery and freedom to the histories of gender formations and public politics, this book reappraises the urban, legal, and social realities of Rio de Janeiro and Havana. Nevertheless, for those still more concerned with the cause-and-effect, nuts and bolts dimensions of the abolition story, this book carefully illuminates how free and enslaved agency catalyzed shifts in local politics and public opinion; it stresses that women’s petitions for freedom drew important public figures into the slavery debates, and thereby changed the tone and direction of such debates. From the municipal government of Rio de Janeiro to the Spanish parliament, political discussions about abolition reflected real-time developments on the ground. If seemingly obvious, this is a dynamic that, nonetheless, often goes under explored in works bent on identifying who deserves credit for abolition. Conceiving Freedom establishes a new empirical and conceptual starting point for future studies on women’s activism, race, and citizenship in the Americas.

The parallel and mutually-informing trajectories of gradual abolition in Spanish Cuba and Brazil frame Cowling’s discussions of the “free womb” laws and their wider implications. Both measures, one passed in 1870 in Spanish Cuba and the other in 1871 in Brazil, emerged from the turbulent 1860s. The U.S. Civil War, as well as, the outbreak of the Ten Year’s War in Cuba (1868–78) and the Paraguayan War (1864–70) in South America influenced the legal course of emancipation in these last slave strongholds. If precipitated by specific political crises in each place, it is important to underscore, as Cowling does, that these laws arose while slaveholding was still profitable on its own, and while the export economies of sugar in Cuba and coffee in Brazil remained integrally connected to local and Atlantic industrial capitalist networks (5–8). The process of abolition, then, unfolded amid a series of political, cultural, and legal changes that contradicted economic logic. The personal dramas traced in Conceiving Freedom reflect this period of great ferment, and the reader is reminded from the outset that enslaved women very much acted upon these changing times. Cowling sets straight the all-too-often glossed over reality that, almost suddenly, “the wombs of enslaved women, previously vessels for transmitting enslavement, became spaces in which freedom was, literally, conceived” (9).

The book is structured thematically and divided into three parts. It begins by situating the political and legal context of abolition in Rio and Havana, arguing that these were much more different than similar despite their shared Iberian/Latin American heritage. It then carefully considers how gender and city life influenced the possibilities of claiming freedom, before closing with a gripping assessment of how discussions about womanhood and motherhood became sites where elites and freedpeople disputed the terms of such newfound freedom. The final chapters yield an invaluable perspective into how freedwomen attempted to consolidate their freedom in slavery’s waning years—buying property or defending their bodily integrity, for...